


The Saccharine Doppelganger

by CalvinCopyright



Category: Homestuck, SBURB Glitch FAQ
Genre: Gen, If You Are Playing Sburb, Read This If You Want To Live
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-18
Updated: 2014-09-18
Packaged: 2018-02-17 19:34:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2320874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CalvinCopyright/pseuds/CalvinCopyright
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hi, I decided to write a guest chapter for GodsGiftToGrinds' SBURB Glitch FAQ, because the Saccharine Doppelganger chapter is still offline, and I have info on the topic now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Saccharine Doppelganger

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GodsGiftToGrinds](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GodsGiftToGrinds/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Sburb Glitch FAQ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/340777) by [GodsGiftToGrinds](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GodsGiftToGrinds/pseuds/GodsGiftToGrinds). 



> First time writing something for AO3, so sorry that the formatting's fucked up. I don't know how GGTG does it. :/

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(I put that there to help the poor guys who get redirected here from that one FAQ section.)

Hello everyone, I'm calvinCopyright, native Mage of Mind, and I have recently come across a lot of information on Saccharine Doppelgangers in a rather unpleasant way. That way being that somehow, we managed to get a S.D. for every single person on our team this session. (Dammit, Mist aspect.) I was the Guard of Void; our other players were Thief of Blood, Ward of Mist, Smith of Space, Sage of Time, Page of Might, Maid of Rage, Scout of Life. Pretty standard session, relatively few glitches starting out. I actually thought we would get through it all right.

Silly me.

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First of all, here's a quick timeline of what I went through. Context and stuff. Also, helps show why I know so much about the bastards now. I need to write this down before I hit the replay button, just in case I forget stuff.

I think it started when the Blood player decided to autoproduce bullets for a machinegun he made (he wrangled a specibus for it out of an imp) and portal them into his gun's magazine so that he'd never have to reload. He hadn't read GGTG's FAQ, I suppose, and I didn't catch it because I wasn't in an Unbreakable Union with him.

We started seeing more low-level glitches. This was really weird/suspicious, because we didn't have most of them to start out with. Didn't realize it was a S.D. situation, though.

Then the Blood player's bullet alchemiter broke, and we started getting the late stage warning signs. A Giclops with a zilly weapon killed the Life player, but his partner got to him in time to corpsesmooch.

Then the Life player found a Doppelganger and she called for backup. The Time, Might, and Life players attacked it; it got away. The Mist player went catatonic soon after, and we didn't know why (in retrospect, it was probably Mist interference with the Doppelganger that knocked him out and created the rest of them). Next time, there were three S.Ds, and they didn't wait to attack. We were in two teams of four and three by that time; it was my team of four that got attacked. We killed the Might player's S.D, but had to abscond; the Time player died when his team of three got attacked at the grist exchange after that, and we corpsesmooched him too. We had a team meeting with everybody, and decided to hide someplace easily fortifiable.

The hiding place ended up being the Skian Magicant (because holy crap roleplaying bonuses for Guard of Void), and we barricaded all the entrances we could find. We spent weeks in there keeping them from breaking in, and got EXCEEDINGLY familiar with the things in the process. We could hear them talking outside. We found nobody except the Might player could go to sleep, then. From what he told me, Prospit quests ended up being totally glitched for him, so he got the carapacians to take him to the Crypt Beds.

Where he found the Mist player's dreamself. Sure hadn't been there before the doppelgangers happened. He woke up, BT'd, and killed the catatonic Mist player BEFORE he told us what he'd found. More BTs happened, and we killed him for it. Oops. Of course, they both ascended soon after when their dreamselves bled out; they tried to get back to the Magicant from an entrance on the Mist player's Land, and triggered a big battle. We broke down a barricade to let them in, I had to tank the damage because of roleplay. The Time and Rage players ended up dying permanently, and two other people (including me) had to be corpsesmooched in the middle of the battle too, but we killed all but three of the Doppelgangers.

Not much to say after that. We lost a lot more time hiding in there before the rest of us managed to ambush the rest of the Doppelgangers individually and kill them off, so the Reckoning ended up happening before we were really ready. Lost the Might player in the fight with the Black King. The Mist, Blood, Space, and Life players and I are currently surviving for new game plus.

***

Ok, now here's the thing that's actually controversial. I have an educated guess about where Saccharine Doppelgangers come from.

I think that, like those green asshole guardian NPCs you sometimes see laying around, Saccharine Doppelgangers are remnants from an old version of Sburb that never really got cut out completely. Yes, I do think it's version drift. I mean, think about it.

If you've ever seen Doppelgangers, they all have the same personality; they're all poisonously bubbly and upbeat. I see them being the result of software that tests how well personalities can be converted into statistics.

If you've ever seen that weird grist type Zillium that inevitably gets found in S.D. situations, you'll notice that zilly stuff can be made only with zillium. To me, that looks like someone was playtesting the alchemization mechanics.

Anyway, that's my theoretical two cents... which I probably could have phrased more convincingly.... Eh, fuck it, I'm not a Mind player this session, it's not my strength. Defensive strategy is more my thing right now.

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First off, a reiterated warning to Blood players out there: autoproducing items with an alchemiter is possible, but if anyone else is nearby the miter and they use aspect powers, it will cause glitches for sure. It may or may not happen with Void, of course, because quite honestly, no one really knows what that aspect will end up doing; sometimes not even the Void player. However, Mist players in particular will wreck your shit. That aspect gets everywhere; if you have a Mist player, he/she will manage to glitch your apparatus out from two planets over.

Second, don't damage the computers in the Grist Stock Exchange. This can cause a lot of the same glitches that animated alchemiters can, such as the unlocking-Zillium glitch.

I'll add more if I can remember anything else bad that happened with us.

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If your session goes sugar, these can start happening in basically any order. Most of these have to do with the game reacting to the personality (if it can be called that) of the un-formed Doppelganger because it thinks it's your own.

1\. Dream moon and maturity quests mysteriously have to be done over or get to be skipped.  
It can be hard to tell when maturity quest progress starts being changed because there are so many individual quests, and they aren't very distinguishable. But if you seem to be progressing unusually fast or slow, be wary. I suspect that in rare cases, all your quests might get finished for you; however, this would be completely unpredictable, and I would not recommend trying to gamebreak with this.

2\. Worked up angels in the Underworld.  
When sugar starts happening, the angels in the Underworld will become much more agitated. They will stop flying down to the surface of the Underworld and simply fly really fast circles around the Heart. This makes it a lot easier to navigate the Underworld and get underworld grist, but actually reaching the Heart becomes a bitch and a half. This is the most obvious sign of sugar, but of course, you have to get to the Underworld first. If you've ever seen a Doppelganger, you'll probably agree with me that their tendency to do stupid and random stuff would make them regular Law-breaking machines. I hypothesize that the angels were swarming up there because the Doppelganger didn't actually exist at that point; they think that there's a Law-breaker, but they can't find it.

3\. It gets much harder to go to sleep.  
This was happening to us for a while. Having sugar in the session can cause glitches similar to extra-dreamself or glitched-sleep-ratio bugs due to the Doppelganger's extra personality. I recommend keeping logs to help determine whether it's actually a sugar situation.

4\. More occurrances of low-level mental disorders like dErP, Phrenic Fever, Phantasmagoric Waltz, Clockwork Sorrow, etc.  
For a while before a Doppelganger is actually made, that stupidly happy personality they all have can supercede yours temporarily at times. Since the Saccharine mindset is technically a hack to get you into a frame of mind that can think about bad stuff without becoming depressed, this isn't really a bad thing by itself, but if you're thinking about stuff like weird time shit with the sugar half, then a random personality swap can neatly dunk your mind into a feedback loop because of your suddenly reduced tolerances for bad thoughts.

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These revolve around sugar rot reverting game mechanics unrelated to personality to the really old version that never went away.

1\. New grist type: Zillium  
This is the second reason why I now support the version drift theory. This happens when an Alchemiter is enlivened, then glitched out badly; it can attempt to make stuff that requires Zillium, which is essentially a debug grist type that was taken out. Your grist screen will display 4 columns of 9 grist types each; this is what makes it so easy to see that Zillium is glitched. If you haven't unlocked every grist type yet, then Zillium will replace one of the standard grist types, and yes, this can make stuff that uses the grist it replaces uncraftable. However, if you have unlocked every grist type, it'll create a new grist type icon that glitches off the bottom with no scroll icon.

2\. Mysteriously find really powerful weapons with Zilly theme.  
This can happen without unlocking the new Grist type because of Sburb's mechanic of letting players find powerful weapons through various mechanisms, but it's still a pretty bad warning sign. PSA: Uncrafting one of these will unlock Zillium grist and break stuff, so don't do that.

3\. Aspect-infused items start breaking on their own.  
If you've ever tried to infuse an item with multiple aspects, you should know that that doesn't usually work out that well; it usually results in breakage. However, when sugar gets bad, your aspect starts disassociating from you to attach to the nascent Doppelganger; this doesn't affect your personal control of your aspect or your Whisperings, and Doppelgangers never use aspect powers, but aspect weapons that you use will become harder to control and may even break.

4\. Your dreamself starts sleepwalking.  
This is bad news. If you start dream-waking in a different place than the one you went to sleep in, it means that the Doppelganger is formed enough to start waking up in your dreamself's body. The only good thing about this is that you know it's you that'll have a doppelganger, so you can ask your fellow players to put you on watch before the Doppelganger actually happens. Note that you can probably wake up ANYWHERE. Like I said, we found our Mist player's dreamself on his Crypt Bed when it hadn't been there before; it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to say the Doppelganger sleepwalked him there before dissociation.

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These are the dangerous things that generally happen after the Doppelganger actually appears. If you see any of this happening, YOU ARE IN DANGER.

1\. The Zillium grist counter starts rising on its' own.  
This happens when a Doppelganger gets its' hands on an alchemiter. If this happens, the Doppelganger is making the cheat weapons I mentioned earlier. If this happens, you have suddenly become a lot more boned; those weapons are stupid powerful, and because they're made of Zillium, they can be produced without end. The Doppelganger can and will use them on you.

2\. Your whispers start saying unusual things.  
Trust me, you'll know if this starts happening. Doppelgangers can't use aspect powers directly, but if they get their hands on an item imbued with your aspect, it lets them hijack your whispers and say stuff to you. This is incredibly bad for your mental health; get the aspect item away from them ASAP.

3\. A player falls asleep and won't wake up.  
This happened to our Mist player. Because the rest of us couldn't sleep at all, It must have been the personality split getting really severely dreamself-affecting. It may be only applicable to Mist players, but I still recommend stopping going to sleep if this happens to someone, at least until the Doppelgangers are killed, to keep it from happening to you, too. Of course, that's debilitating in its' own way, so be careful.

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Fortunately, there's not much strategy to this. Stay together. Call for backup. Doppelgangers are pretty powerful; add their broken personalities on top of that, and you get a trigger-happy tank that can pretty easily take down a lone player.

If you have to delay a Doppelganger until your fellow players get to your location or whatever, you can simply talk to them. Of course, it's not quite that easy; follow these guildelines when talking to them.

1\. Act happy.  
Doppelgangers' broken personalities makes them want to help people. If they think that you need help, they will help you... by bashing you over the head with Zilly items. Don't panic; deep breaths. Smile at the Doppelganger. You don't want to set it off.

2\. Don't talk about complicated stuff like prophecies, weird time shit, or sad stuff like your Denizen death.  
These are prime topics to provoke the S.D.'s particular brand of 'help'.

3\. TREAT IT LIKE IT'S THE REAL PLAYER.  
Can't emphasize this enough. If you let on that you know it's fake, it'll attack immediately.

4\. Figure out which player the Doppelganger's impersonating, then ask them about that player's problems.  
This is a good thing to try, because it makes the S.D. think you think it's real, and it's isn't your complicated stuff you're talking about. The Doppelganger will go into full diabetes mode when you ask it this stuff; it'll tell you all about how it solved its' problems by not caring about them, being happy, etc. It will keep talking for a long time if you egg it on in the right way, and a good way to do this is, strangely, by offering to help the Doppelganger with its' problems.

5\. If it insists on doing stuff with you instead of talking, bring it to your cookalizer and other food Skaiatech to distract it.  
You generally want to keep the Doppelganger where you found it, but if you have to, this is one thing that it's really easy to get the Doppelganger to agree to do. It'll start using any machine it sees, so do NOT let it see your alchemiter. When you get there, it'll distract itself by trying to make food as sweet as possible. Needless to say, don't eat anything that it makes.

6\. If you have to run away, USE A METHOD OF FLIGHT if possible.  
Doppelgangers are REALLY REALLY GOOD at sneaking up on you and knowing where you are. You won't be able to hide. If you're flying, at least you'll be able to see them coming at you.

7\. HYPOTHETICAL: If you end up having to flee from one, lure them to the Underworld.  
We didn't get to test this one, but we saw the angels swarming. They might actually get attacked by the angels if you lure them down there. Of course, since the Doppelganger is technically you, this might cause angel corruption. It's your call whether or not to try this.

***

All right, that's it, I'm out. Good luck on your next Saccharine Doppelganger encounter, you'll need it.

EDIT: Oh my god I hate typos. "highjack" instead of "hijack". Mislabeled item 7 as 6 in "how to deal" list. Used two periods somewhere up top. I cannot wait to be a Mind player again, let me tell you.


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